


through all the smoke

by finalizer



Category: If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio
Genre: Fix-It, Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 20:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21398362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finalizer/pseuds/finalizer
Summary: He blinked and the phantom still lingered.
Relationships: Oliver Marks/James Farrow
Comments: 13
Kudos: 99





	through all the smoke

**Author's Note:**

> i finished this book last night and spent an hour crying on the bathroom floor, promised myself i wouldn't write a happy ending, and then did just that

He held the scrap of paper gingerly like the ink would smear if he pressed too hard. The words reverberated through his mind. _The body was never found. The body was never found. The body was never found._

The computer screen had long since flickered to black. He sat in the office, unmoving, not daring to believe. The sun went down, the New York skyline swimming through reds and pinks and yellows before settling on a starless black.

He woke the next morning, alone, the bed cold. His lungs ached. The letter lay on the bedside table just as he’d left it. Part of him had expected it to be gone—a dream, a hallucination, improbable, impossible.

The day slipped away and it was night again. And again. Everything felt strangely numb.

He packed a bag, booked a flight; one-way to Sacramento. He told Meredith he missed the sun. If she suspected anything, she didn't say. She hadn't seen the envelope or the words scribbled within.

The sand was warm beneath his bare feet and the waves lapped at his ankles. His heart felt lighter, somehow, than it had in years. Empty, but without the weight tied around it that had dragged him down for so long into the depths.

He didn't know where to start or whether to start at all. The road whipped by as he stared out the window of his northbound bus and thought, _I’ve already started. _He’d chosen to believe.

He considered London, Rome, Athens. He dismissed them all.

He raked his eyes over the lush green of Del Norte and the frigid water beating against jagged rocks and towering cliffs. He dismissed it, too. He spent two nights in a motel with no central heating and a continental breakfast that tasted of cardboard.

Two words tugged at him. Cold. Chill. _A man throng'd up with cold: my veins are chill. _And they felt wrong. It was as simple as that, a visceral instinct.

His wallet was too light for another plane ticket. He gathered up a wad of crinkled bills and boarded a red-eye Greyhound to San Francisco, and from there to San Diego. He liked to think of James someplace warm.

The thought startled him. He hadn't let himself think that name before, instead chasing after something nameless, indescribable.

He had breakfast in a boardwalk cafe. The deck underfoot was painted white, chipped and well-loved. He watched the waitress make her rounds. She refilled mugs and smiled at regulars. He felt like his veins could burst open and flood the room; whatever this was, the heat in his gut, it finally felt right.

Meredith called. He told her he needed more time. Pip called. He told her he was alright.

He walked dogs. Washed windows. With the right smile, he passed for twenty-four, twenty-five. Young enough to claim that his hectic university schedule allowed only for odd jobs at strange hours. This way, he didn't have to be Oliver Marks. He could be nobody, he could be anybody.

Alexander called. Idly, he wondered who’d given him the number. They made plans for coffee when he returned. _If_ he returned, he didn't say.

Weeks later, he hadn't left.

His apartment was a rental, one of those places to be booked for a few days or a few months. The walls were pale yellow and bare. The bed creaked and whined beneath him when he snapped upright from his nightmares. He saw Richard’s face staring back at him. He saw a mirrored stage. He felt the press of lips and hot tears on his cheeks. He couldn't tell what was real.

He bought a battered paperback, a compendium of Shakespeare’s more obscure works, in a family run charity shop off the beaten path. The clerk smiled sweetly at him as he paid with a handful of quarters. The bangles on her wrists twinkled. He thought of Gwendolyn.

He leaned back against the headboard of his bed and read until his eyes drooped.

Days and nights swam by like melted chocolate, oozing slowly, lazily. He was fond of the climate here, cherished the heat, felt like he could sink into it.

One night, the wind howled and rain lashed against the windows. He thought of the Dellecher library. James on the table, face white, hands trembling, candlelight sparkling in his wide eyes.

He found work where they didn't ask for Social Security. He kept cash stuffed under his mattress like a scorned lover on the run.

Months passed as smoothly as flicking through a calendar, as though he’d blinked and half the pages were gone. He hardly looked at the time. He answered every other call.

The ocean roared around him as he ducked beneath the waves. It was freeing. He was soaring. The water gleamed as the sun went down. He emerged and ran his fingers through his hair, longer now than it had been in prison, and spat the salt from his lips.

He visited the theater—the Old Globe, which amused him to no end—and sat in the back. His head spun. He couldn't stay still. He left before the intermission.

His battered paperback was full of notes and annotations now, loops in red pen and pencil scribbles in the margins. The letter—he’d brought it with him—lay untouched in the drawer beside the bed, atop the Bible, like a prayer.

The leaves crunched beneath his boots in the autumn, and soon the spring air surrounded him like a sickly perfume. The world bloomed in the summer, the palms a luscious green overhead. The sun felt like salvation.

Balboa Park was his favorite: the terra-cotta and mosaics, the archaic architecture and the ponds littered with water lilies. He disappeared on the trails, day after day.

July came to a close and he considered, for the first time, going back. He thought of the cold and cringed away like he could already feel its cruel embrace. He thought of the looks they would give him, his friends. Sorrow. Pity. By now, surely, they knew why he’d gone to California: to search for a ghost. But they didn't know about Pericles.

The first time, he wrote it off as a hallucination. It was a warm August morning. He sat on a rickety bench and worked through a novel he’d picked up at a flea market, the spine cracked, the pages bent.

It caught his eye—a crisp white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, a flash of dark hair.

He blinked and the phantom still lingered. He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw stars and counted to ten, mangled the paper in his hands as he gripped too hard. The phantom was gone. He got up to head back, dizzy, avoiding his reflection in the lily pond. He’d had enough of fleeting specters.

Pip told him she was worried. He told her he was happy.

It happened again mid-September. It was a long weekend, a holiday of some sort. He hadn't bothered to glance at his calendar. The Alcazar Garden was fairly empty in the late afternoon; three or four people milling about. The sun painted the treetops gold, it painted the gravel gold, it painted James’ face gold.

He stopped.

The air froze in his lungs and his pulse hammered so quickly, so suddenly, he thought he might black out. His heart climbed up his throat and James stared back. His knees buckled under his weight and James stepped closer.

James’ skin felt warm to the touch as he held him upright, breathed him in. James, shaking against him, fingers curled into his shirt, whispering his name like he didn't really trust himself to say it aloud. _Oliver_. He hadn't heard it in too long.

“Bastard.”

He couldn't choke out anything else.

“You _bastard_.”

James tucked his face into the crook of Oliver’s neck, pressed his lips there, brushed his fingertips through his hair so gently it felt like a dream, yet so tangible, so familiar against him he knew it was not.

They slept side by side in James’ bed, the way they used to. At James’ parents’ house a lifetime ago. In their dormitory, before the ice beneath their feet shattered. In Oliver’s childhood room, one night after Thanksgiving.

When Oliver floated awake, James was curled against him, his palm splayed over Oliver's chest, over his heart.

Meredith called. He didn't answer. He made a note to get back to her once his head stopped spinning.

James hummed before work as he made coffee at the kitchen counter. No milk, two sugars. He smiled at Oliver from the doorway to their bedroom dressed in nothing but a smile, a vision in the pale sunlight. He held Oliver’s face in his hands like he never wanted to let go and arched into his touch like he never wanted to feel anything else.

They went together—London, Rome, Athens. This time, it made sense. Their fingers intertwined as they retraced history. For a moment, everything else vanished and time stood still.

California welcomed them back with open arms. Oliver moved into James’ apartment and picked out a clever fake name to match his. Just in case, a precaution. He called his friends and told them he was staying. He didn't say why. He didn't mention James. Not yet. One day, when he was ready, James said.

Oliver woke in the mornings with the sun on his face and James in his arms. He held him like he couldn't get close enough and leaned in to kiss him, over and over, like he was afraid he’d never get another chance. At the bathroom sink, through the foam of toothpaste. Out on the terrace, the tiles warm against his toes and James hot against him. In the living room, where James sat with a book. Oliver nudged it down a fraction and kissed him over the yellowed pages. James let him, every time. James smiled at him and the spark in his eyes felt like home.

It all felt like home. The bed, the crisp sheets, the soft lines of the body beside his. The affectionate words and the wicked arguments, every bit of it. The apologies. The confessions. James’ name on his lips and James’ mouth on the backs of his thighs. The fluorescents in the convenience store downstairs and the neon lights in the bar down the street. The greasy take-out and the cheap bourbon. Two a.m. in the kitchen with the radio on, arms around each other in a clumsy stumble. The ring around Oliver’s finger and the promise of forever.

**Author's Note:**

> title from _breathing fire_ by bad child
> 
> i'm on [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/finaIizer) & [tumblr](https://tarmairons.tumblr.com)


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